Short-lived Warriors had fun

Thursday

The return of professional hockey to Worcester can be classified a success, although the final nine games of the Sharks’ regular season still hold some drama.

The new team in town has been a good one — entertaining, exciting, unpredictable — but a playoff berth is not yet guaranteed, and if it happens, the Sharks will have done something neither of their two predecessors were able to achieve.

Make the playoffs in their inaugural season.

Two predecessors, indeed. There were the IceCats of not-so-long ago, who missed the playoffs in 1994-95, and the region’s first-ever professional team, the old, nearly forgotten, Worcester Warriors of 1954-55.

The Warriors played in the Eastern Hockey League, a direct ancestor of today’s very successful ECHL. The Eastern Hockey League was a venerable old circuit that had fallen on hard times in the early ’50s. The Warriors were the former Boston Olympics franchise, given to Worcester Arena owner Larz Anderson so the league would have enough franchises to play in 1954-55 after having been in mothballs the previous winter.

It was a unique experience, since the Eastern League was a pro league, but the Warriors were not a pro team. Its players got expense money, but worked real day jobs. The roster included many top former New England college players and a sprinkling of older amateurs. Only one Warrior was a Worcester resident, Bill Allain, and he had come to the city just four years earlier after growing up in New Brunswick, and learning the sport up there.

Allain still lives here.

“It was a very low-key operation,” he remembered, “but it was a lot of fun. We had ex-Division 1 college players, and the rest of the teams had a lot of Canadians. They’d get $75 a week, and their teams would find them jobs. Most of our road trips, we made in somebody’s car. Once, we took the train from Boston to Baltimore.”

The New Haven Blades, Washington Lions, Baltimore Clippers and Clinton Comets were the other EHL teams in 1954-55. Worcester was coached by Hans Marsden, whom players remember as an Austrian, and whom Anderson said in a 1994 interview was a Czech. One thing was certain — Marsden’s accent was so pronounced that he was hard to understand. He knew one English phrase, Anderson said: “Stick on ice.”

The Warriors were not very good. They finished in last place at 3-17-0 and only played a partial schedule. Worcester began its season on Nov. 14 in New Haven and lost its first six games, then had a homestand in mid-December in which it won three in a row. On Dec. 28, Worcester played New Haven at the arena in Webster Square and sold out. Capacity was 1,014, and Anderson had to turn away 400 fans.

When the season began, Worcester’s top players were John Titus from Dartmouth, Frank O’Grady from Boston College, Walter Greeley from Harvard, Jack Garritty from Boston University and goalie Ray Picard from Northeastern. Titus, O’Grady and Greeley were the No. 1 line, and they were good, but it was hard to keep the roster together.

“We had a lot of collegians, and when we played at home, we were all right,” O’Grady remembered. “But a lot of times, the guys couldn’t make the road trips, so we’d go down to Baltimore with six or seven players and pick up some kids in New York on the way.”

After the homestand, the Warriors sort of disintegrated. Titus, who wound up as the leading scorer; and O’Grady were recruited to play on the U.S. national team. Garritty got tired of playing for expense money, as Greeley remembers, and formed his own traveling amateur team.

By the end of the year, the Warriors were a mess. They lost their last three games by 17-1, 12-2 and finally, on home ice, 20-3, to New Haven.

Despite the lack of on-ice success, Warriors players generally have fond memories of the experience.

“I had a wonderful time,” said Greeley. “The best thing about it was that we were a team of Americans playing in a league against Canadians.”

Worcester played more games against New Haven than against any other team, and the one home sellout was against the Blades, who featured Don Perry, a true-to-life character out of “Slap Shot” who went on to eventually coach the Los Angeles Kings of the NHL.

“I knew enough to stay away from that guy,” O’Grady remembered.

“Perry almost killed me once. He broke one of my ribs,” said Greeley. “I was in the navy at the time and had to make up a story about some accident to cover for myself.”

O’Grady was in the Air Force at the time, and Allain worked for a contractor. Charley Jordan drove a bakery truck, and Dick Rodenhiser, a member of the 1960 gold medal U.S. Olympic team, repossessed cars.

Greeley remembers a game in Baltimore that was on TV and after Jordan scored, he danced around the ice like a figure skater, bowing and doing pirouettes. And another in Clinton where Picard, after giving up 10 goals, saw the Comets headed down ice once more and picked up the net, then turned it around backward.

While the Warriors did not win many games, they left a bit of a hockey legacy around New England. Allain’s son, Keith, became one of Worcester’s top high school goalies and is head coach at Yale. Len Ceglarski, who coached at BC for years, played for the Warriors. So did Ed Cahoon, father of current UMass-Amherst coach Toot Cahoon. Butch Songin, the first quarterback in Patriots history, played for the Warriors.

They had a short life, but were Worcester’s first pro hockey team, and their memory has survived through the long years.

Thomas Greiss’ pick as Player of the Week came almost exactly two years after the last Worcester choice as POW. That was Jay McClement of the IceCats, chosen on March 15, 2005. … It will be unfortunate if Greiss winds up being denied his only shutout of the season because of that disputed goal in Saturday night’s Providence game, but this typist thinks that referee Conrad Hache made the right call. Beyond that, Hache deserves credit for doing his best to get it right rather than just trying to make a quickie call. … Goalie Corey Crawford stole a point for Norfolk on Friday night in the Admirals’ 2-1 OT loss at Wilkes-Barre. It was a 1-1 game going into overtime even though the Penguins had a 46-18 advantage in shots on goal. … Albany has lost four in a row, all by 3-2 scores. … John Bednarski, a great defenseman with Rochester and the Providence Reds among other AHL teams, was inducted into the Americans’ Hall of Fame on Sunday. … Hershey has hit the 100-point mark for the fifth time in franchise history. The Bears have won the Calder Cup three times when reaching triple figures, including last year. … Hartford made it to 40 victories for the fourth straight season and eighth in the 10 years it has been in the league. Considering how good the Wolf Pack have been, it has to be discouraging to see attendance hovering in the 4,000 range. … So, what about those nasty three-in-threes teams play all the time? Hartford lost to the Sharks on Friday night, 5-2, then bused to Wilkes-Barre for a Saturday night game it won, 4-3, then bused back to Providence for a Sunday afternoon game it won, 1-0.

Toronto beat Grand Rapids on Sunday, 5-3, at Ricoh Coliseum. The Marlies had 15 power plays — is that a record? — and the Griffins 8. The minors broke down this way — nine roughings, four hookings, three slashings, two holdings, two interferences, two unsportsmanlikes, one tripping, one charging, one cross-checking and one instigating. … Omaha won at Houston on Sunday, 10-2, with Holy Cross alum Tony Quesada getting the start in goal for the Aeros. Quesada stopped 11 of 15 shots in half a game before being replaced by veteran Dieter Kochan, who stopped 10 of 16. … On Jan. 26, Portland and Syracuse swapped front line players — Zenon Konopka and Curtis Glencross to the Crunch, Joe Motzko and Mark Hartigan to the Pirates. Portland was 20-18-6 before the trade and is 10-9-6 since. Syracuse was 15-24-6 before and is 13-7-4 since. … Worth noting — the Sharks are 15-5-3 when Mathieu Darche scores a goal and 20-20-8 when he does not. Worcester is 12-5-3 with Tom Walsh in the lineup, 23-20-8 without him. … This column takes next week off with this correspondent being in the Midwest for the Red Sox’ first road trip of the season.

The Sharks Booster Club held its first awards banquet on Sunday at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Worcester.

It recognized Darche as Top Scorer, Best Offensive Player and Most Valuable Player; Brennan Evans as Best Defensive Player and Tough Guy; Riley Armstrong as Fan Favorite and Seven Hills Seventh Player; Greiss as Rookie of the Year and Josie Brown as Booster of the Year. Darche was also honored for the Best Single-Game Performance for going 3-2-5 vs. Manchester on Dec. 22.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.